Capital markets and financial institutions are all around us. This is an enormous industry in which powerful players oftentimes challenge investors and the public at large and expose them to significant risks.
This Course provides for the deep understanding of the core ideas, concepts, and mechanisms of the modern capital market in a learner-friendly way. We will analyze the market’s most fundamental problems, realize the intrinsic interests of the market participants, reveal the true meaning of certain financial terms, and uncover credible signals of the likely behavior of economic agents – all that with little math and a lot of fun.
The learners will be much better positioned with respect to the financial environment. They will see through the financial news, reveal the risks of the financiers’ wishful thinking promises, and protect themselves against dangerous adventures. The learners will get the opportunity to use the obtained knowledge, skills, and understanding for the successful professional career in the financial and other business areas, as well as in their day-to-day life.

Week 4 of the Course consists of two parts. The first part is devoted to the discussion of challenges and development of banking regulation. We consider the S&L market crash of the 1980’s as a trigger to the initiation of the worldwide regulatory movement. You will get introduced to the Basel process as the basis of the modern bank regulation.
The second part of Week 4 shifts focus somewhat. We will talk about the payment services that are tantamount to banking for the majority of population, at least in the developed world. We will discuss how the fast development of IT technologies, the Internet and the social media influences banking business. But we will see that the most important functions of banking – asset monitoring and liquidity creation – do not disappear but take a new shape. At the very end we will drop a few words about private banking – a very specific area of banking services for high net worth individuals.